Andrew Weaver, Climate Crusader
Andrew Weaver is one of the world’s leading climatologists, with utility companies and multinational corporations reliant on his research to make key business decisions. But he’s also a lightning rod for Canada’s climate-change deniers, who don’t care for his activism and question his scientific credentials .
How much rain is going to fall into BC Hydro’s Williston Reservoir, say, in 2065? Even Stephanie Smith, BC Hydro’s manager of hydrology and technology services, bridles at the question – and she has budgeted $300,000 in the next four years to try to get an answer. Smith is in the crystal ball business. In the midst of B.C.’s complicated geography, changeable climate and burgeoning population, it’s her job to forecast how much water is likely to flow through the utility’s dams and generating stations, so BC Hydro brass can decide how much capacity they will have to add (or how much to dampen demand) to meet market expectations.
This has always been a difficult task: Mother Nature seems to take great delight in violating the guesstimates that we make on the basis of what usually occurs. But climate change is making the job tougher still. A weather system charged with more energy (the increasing heat from global warming) is expected to be capable of greater extremes. For example, Canadians and Canadian businesses have been warned to expect both more rain – more spring and winter floods – and longer droughts. Rising temperatures are wearing away at B.C.’s glaciers and mountain snowpack, elements that currently smooth out the flow of water through Hydro’s catchment systems. And bigger, more violent storms come with additional wind, a particular nuisance for a utility that has more than 70,000 kilometres of transmission and distribution lines hanging in the increasingly turbulent air.
“This is not something that BC Hydro can deny or ignore,” Smith says. “We have to identify potential risks and take action to mitigate them. We have to be prepared.”
Cue the Boy Scout? Not quite. BC Hydro’s guide through the bumpy climate of the 21st century is, rather, a rumpled academic: 49-year-old University of Victoria professor Andrew Weaver. Weaver is the Canada Research Chair in Climate Modelling and Analysis, which means that he’s an expert at asking impossibly complicated questions and then coming up with a credible array of answers. It happens that he has also become a national target for the critics who want to ignore, deny or (in their fondest dreams) debunk climate science.
For those lacking in patience or understanding – or those who, for ideological or business reasons, have declared war on climate scientists rather than climate change – Weaver’s job can seem like impractical magic. He and his team load reams of raw numbers into a vast and expensive computer, flip a switch and then come back weeks or months later with something that looks like a weather forecast stretching out to the end of the century. Given how frequently Environment Canada screws up the forecast for next week, this can seem a little hard to swallow.
But as Weaver and Smith are quick to point out, he is not really researching weather. He’s looking at climate, systems and circumstances that are bound by Newton’s laws of motion, by the laws of thermodynamics. When Weaver and his team at UVic’s Pacific Climate Impacts Consortium (PCIC) run a climate-model simulation, they’re basically asking a computer to work out a series of equations that explain how the atmosphere moves, how heat is exchanged, how air currents swirl through the valleys and ravines of B.C.’s mountainous interior. And PCIC and BC Hydro are not alone. Funding partners on this four-year project include the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), which is paying about half the $1.1-million total budget, and industrial partners Hydro-Québec and Rio Tinto Alcan Inc.
On the science side, PCIC is working with the Quebec climate- research consortium Ouranos – another not-for-profit organization including government, academic and industrial partners. Between PCIC and Ouranos, using two separate climate models, Weaver and his colleagues plan to run 5,200 years of calculations, assessing climate across Canada in 15-kilometre squares. At the end, they may even be able to offer a highly educated guess as to how much it’s likely to rain in the Williston Reservoir, not just in 2065, but in every year between now and 2100.
When talking about BC Hydro’s responsibilities and its decision to fund this project, Stephanie Smith said specifically of Weaver, “We want to work with the people we see as tops in their field.” Even had Hydro not worked with PCIC before, Weaver’s 109-page curriculum vitae might give them confidence.
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